The appeal of The Letters of Cole Porter,the first collection of his correspondence, is the chance to experience his effervescent life, sometimes day by day, the way Porter himself experienced it ... The book is most revealing about Porter’s working habits—and most entertaining ... the book’s editors...stretch the bounds of what belongs in a volume of correspondence. For this, they deserve profound thanks. They were remarkably resourceful in finding both letters and supplemental materials, and admirably thoughtful in selecting, arranging and explaining them ... They write in their introduction that the book does not aspire to be another biography of Porter: The goal is to present as much of his correspondence as possible. Yet they’re so thorough about the job that they leave you feeling that you’ve had a full and satisfying account of Porter’s professional and personal lives all the same...
... an intimidating marvel of scholarship, though editors Cliff Eisen and Dominic McHugh weave his correspondence into a mostly tidy account by adding diary excerpts, newspaper clippings and plentiful commentary of their own. There are Cole Porter biographies already (as well as two biopics, nearly 60 years apart, with Cary Grant and then Kevin Kline playing the composer), and another seems unnecessary. Considering all the connective tissue, The Letters of Cole Porter amounts to the last word, a work as disjointed and delightful as any of Porter’s unforgettable songs.
Certainly, Porter’s ghost could not ask for better care than he has been given in The Letters of Cole Porter ... Laid out with a meticulous scholarly apparatus, as though this were the correspondence of Grover Cleveland, every turn in the songwriter’s story is deep-dived for exact chronology, and every name casually dropped by Porter gets a worried, explicatory footnote. The editors have also included some secondary material that is not, strictly speaking, correspondence at all ... As an artist’s letters, they are, truth be told, disappointing. There are few flights of fancy or spontaneous improvisations in Porter’s writings to friends—for such a famous wit, there is remarkably little wit. The most arresting passages of writing and thinking arrive less often in letters-from than in letters-to ... Yet a reader, without learning much directly about Porter’s art, comes away from the book with an even higher opinion of him as an artist than might have been held before ... Clues about his creativity shine through the workmanlike surface.
